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Traffic Snarl

Posted on July 31, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They were in the car and it occurred to him that this particular edition of ‘they’ spent a great deal of time in transit. It wasn’t a bad thing, just a thing. He could be relied on to think of things like that and he could be relied on to get into trouble for saying those things out loud.

He had once said to a really attractive woman whom he had met a few times and had enjoyed talking to, “You? Again?” at an art show they were both attending. He had imagined her to have a sense of humour because she’d got the jokes and the oblique pop culture references that liberally peppered conversations with him. Maybe she had woken up on the wrong side of her bed or maybe it was the way all things were meant to end because she gave him a really dirty look and wandered away. Half-an-hour later he watched her being pawed by a friend of the artist. Three weeks later he happened to be at another show with the artist and his friend and he overheard the Neanderthal bragging about some white chick he had fucked after meeting her at one of those dos. He mentally kicked himself for not being the type of guy who did that kind of thing. God knows he wanted to; it just wasn’t in him to follow through.

The experience had taught him to watch what he said and though he couldn’t see anything wrong with it, he chose not to comment on the fact that they had been together in the car so often. It was amazing how missed sex could scar a guy for life and serve as the most effective object lesson.

Not that she was likely to be paying much attention to anything he said. Her eyes flitted dangerously over everything past the windscreen. Her back was ramrod straight and she was looking at something or maybe for something with an intensity that made him feel like he was driving the car alone. It was almost as if the woman in his passenger seat was, for all effects and purposes, in a different vehicle altogether. It occurred to him that he might have to raise his voice to be heard by her.

Progress was in fits and starts. Per usual there were four lanes of traffic (not including the motorcycles) on a two lane road and vehicles of all sizes, shapes and persuasions (he could never think of a bright green or pale pink car as ‘straight’) were jockeying for position in the daily rite of passage that is ‘every driver for themselves’. Comments from various foreigners, Indian and beyond, about driving in Mumbai visited him as he negotiated another outcropping of BEST bus to fit into a slot between two cars and a minivan.

“I don’t know how you guys do it, I would just have stopped the car and climbed out.”

“How does this get to be a country of over a billion people when everyone drives like they want to die today?”

“Watch out on the left!”

“Are all bus drivers mad?”

“Y’know when I first came to Bombay I thought it would be such a good idea to have rickshaws in London…but then I saw how they drive and I’m so glad we don’t have to worry about something like that in our city…”

He glanced in her direction and was a little surprised to find that her fists were bunched up into tight little balls and her lips were pursed as she continued to stare at the world outside the air-conditioned car. It often surprised him to think of how much he enjoyed looking at her. He had read a description about the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal which seemed to fit her best - something about an internal world and the way it informed their expressions.

Bernal and her, not him and her.

He always thought of himself as impassive. He liked that she smiled so much and looked great doing it. Even though there was no evidence of a smile just then.

Suddenly a big car screeched into a small space and ended up pinned between the front left of his car and the back right of a taxicab. There was the hard grinding sound of metal rubbing up against metal without lubrication and both of them looked at the toad-like face of the driver of the offending vehicle that had attempted the ill-advised move.

He started to unlock his door so he could survey the damage but she was out of the car before him. As his head appeared above the roof of the car she screamed in the fat guy’s face, a full-throated, animal scream. Then she punched him in the face. Once, twice…three times was the charm because that punch was followed by the sickeningly satisfying crunch of a nose breaking. The fat man’s hands rushed to the rescue of his face and she turned to him and said, “Let’s go. He’s sorry.”

They dropped into their seats and fastened their seatbelts. He reversed and pulled away before the taxi driver had properly left his vehicle. When they had distanced themselves from the scene she wiped the blood off her knuckles with a tissue and said, “I really needed to punch somebody today.”

He didn’t think the explanation deserved a response so he nodded and stayed focused on the relatively open stretch of road they were covering at the moment. “By the way,” she continued, “this is fun and all but when are we going to have sex?”

She was smiling when he checked so he responded in kind.

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